Hal Duncan
Notes from New Sodom: The Bleating of the Lesser Snipewank
Save Our Snipewanks! You may have heard of the UK lawsuit where a judge just awarded £65,000 to a writer wronged by a review. Long story short, Sarah Thornton’s book, Seven Days in the Art World, was reviewed in the Daily Torygraph by Lynn Barber, one of the people she interviewed for it. In her [...]
Notes from New Sodom: The Order of the Blue Flower
The Rapture of Unreason “I grew up around Christians who believed in a seven day creation, preached the reality of Hell and Judgement, and railed against the lie that was evolution. They were also, for the most part, racists and homophobes… And the only difference between them and me was that I had a father [...]
Notes from New Sodom: An Essay into Exoticism
The Appetence for Alterity Exoticism is — rightly — something of a dirty word. It is the commodification of the Other, appropriating the thoughts or clothing or music or food or religion of an unfamiliar culture for the charm of the unfamiliar. The example that always comes to mind for me is Lamont Cranston — [...]
Notes from New Sodom: The Secret Cuisine
Miso Soup at Midnight It’s night in the city of Writing. A librarian sits in the SF Café, looking out on the ghetto of Genre. The whole place has become a little chi-chi over the years, beatnik artists moving in above the brothels and the crack dens. Might almost forget it’s the ghetto, if that [...]
Notes from New Sodom: Monsters
In the Interests of Precision This is not a review. If you want to know whether I think director Gareth Edwards’s debut feature Monsters is worth seeing, I do. Go see it. But this isn’t about how good I think it is, and why; it’s about what the film’s doing, how this strange fiction (the [...]
Notes from New Sodom: The Kipple Foodstuff Factory
The Leopardskin Print of Thrift Shop Drag “Good news for you, good sirs, that I am no longer Don Quixote of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano, whose way of life won for him the name of Good. Now am I the enemy of Amadis of Gaul and of the whole countless troop of his descendants; [...]
Notes from New Sodom: The Booker and the Bistro de Critique
Those Rocket Age Rhapsodies, Those Information Era Operas “No SF novel ever won the Booker.” Somebody, Somewhere, Somewhen If’ you hang out long enough down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café, eventually you’ll hear this axiom, or an axiom like it, muttered with a certain tone of harumph, a petulance in proportion [...]
Notes from New Sodom: Would a Robot Love You?
A Proper Fuckin Robot I’m not sure I’m the most logical person to invite to speak at an arts festival in Tallinn on the theme of “Would you love a robot?” But the invite came in, and I’m game for anything, so what the fuck, I figured; I’m sure I can think of something [...]
Notes from New Sodom: The Combat Fiction Bar & Grill
From Astounding Stories to The Wars My Destination “Gully Foyle is my name, And combat is my nation. Gunfire is my dwelling-place, The wars my destination.” Alfred Bester, The Wars My Destination The SF Café is a curious place. Take a wrong turn when you step inside the door, and you can find yourself not [...]
Notes from New Sodom: The Lost Airbender
Racebending and Lifestyle Theft “If you go exploring in another culture only as a way of improving yourself and your work, that’s blatantly appropriative.” Rose Fox, “A Whiff of Colonialism,” Publishers Weekly Another day, another shitstorm in the SF Café. A couple of months back, some of you might recall, it was one Young Turk [...]
Notes from New Sodom: Calling a Spade a Spade by Hal Duncan
Of Polls and Poles It’s polling day here in the Royal Borough of Kentigern, in the nation of Grand Albion — my country of origin back before I became a fully-naturalised citizen of New Sodom. It’s all terribly tense, with Labour terribly unpopular, but the Conservatives in a bit of a mess and the Liberal [...]
Notes from New Sodom: The Ghost and the Golem – by Hal Duncan
A Rejection of Definition “What SF writers write is SF.” Orson Scott Card So Science Fiction is dead; but the death of Science Fiction is not the end of the story. Rather it’s the beginning of it. Torn apart in the struggles of its factions, deserted by the blood and breath of its most explorative [...]
